Wendi C. Thomas: Documentary examines what happens when the black church confronts AIDS

A breakfast and workshops precede the 11:30 a.m. screening of the 80-minute documentary, "The Gospel of Healing, Volume One: Black Churches respond to HIV/AIDS." Filmmaker Paul Grant, and Rev. Edwin Sanders, who started the First Response Center in Nashville, will attend.

On Feb. 1, 1981, Metropolitan Interdenominational Church in Nashville was founded.

"June 5, 1981 is the date that scientists were able to isolate and identify AIDS," he said.

Three years later, one of the church's founding members died from an AIDS-related opportunistic disease.

In 1993, Sanders' congregation started the First Response Center, which may be the country's only primary health care provider for HIV/AIDS patients created by a predominantly black church.

Metropolitan and four other faith-based models that have boldly confronted the disease are the subject of Paul Grant's documentary, "The Gospel of Healing, Volume One: Black Churches respond to HIV/AIDS," which will be screened in Memphis Saturday as part of World AIDS Day observances.

Megachurches may have millions of dollars and thousands of members, but Grant found that groups like Sanders' 300-member church were fighting hardest to stop the disease and care for those infected.

"We're a small congregation that does big things, but we have a big God," Sanders said.

Grant, who grew up Baptist, watched his father's health decline as he shunned medicine to treat his chronic illness, instead insisting that God would miraculously heal him.

Grant's father died. But Tangy Major, a black, HIV-positive gospel music singer featured in an earlier documentary Grant did for BET, is still alive. Major, who is a guidance counselor in New Jersey, saw things differently.

"(She said) I'm healed because I have medications, I'm healed because I can go to the hospital," Grant said.

"That was a message that I wish my dad had heard."

By now, the sad statistics about the black community and HIV/AIDS are familiar. We make up less than 14 percent of the population, but account for nearly half of new HIV infections.

The infection rate for black women is 15 times higher than that of white women and three times that of Latina women.

All this I knew, but this detail I didn't: One in 16 black men and one in 32 black women will be diagnosed with HIV in his or her lifetime, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Instead of marking AIDS as a moral failure, the church should look at how infection rates are linked to poverty, the lack of education about sexually transmitted diseases and limited access to health care, mental health services and stable housing.

"We know people are going to have sex, we should at least be open-minded enough that the populace is informed on how to do those things without jeopardizing their life," said Sanders, a 1965 graduate of Melrose High.

Through drug treatment, HIV testing, support groups, pastoral counseling, emergency housing and financial assistance, the First Response Center reaches 5,000 people and manages care for 800 people living with HIV/AIDS each year.

His church lives the "whosever" of John 3:16, Sanders said, and welcomes everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or sexual identity.

"None of the things that fragment and divide do we allow to interrupt our community," Sanders said.

When asked if he should concern himself first with spiritual matters, Sanders borrows his response from the documentary's motto: Sometimes, you have to save a life to save a soul.